Rigo Award Keynote Paper

My interest in this talk is in exploration of small change and the study of
user experience. How can small, mundane and usually hidden change(s) interact
with the study of user experience to gain the visible force needed to propel
both into deeper understandings of users (and more canny products)?

Research Papers

Process models are composed of graphical elements and words. However, words
used to name elements during process design have potentially ambiguous
meanings, which might result in quality problems. We believe that ontologies
might serve as a means to address this problem. This paper discusses aspects
related to words used to represent concepts in labels and why ontologies can
improve this representation. Also, we analyze how the requirements
specifications can influence the terms used during modeling. The discussion
regarding ontologies is conceptual. We performed an experiment to analyze
empirically the vocabulary problem in the context of process models. In the
experiment the selection of terms represented with different levels of
explicitness in requirements specifications is evaluated. Our findings suggest
that the vocabulary problem occurs in process models. Also, different levels of
explicitness affect the labels but are not sufficient to solve the vocabulary
problem.

This paper discusses the role of Financial Inclusion in a country like India
and mobile banking as a means to attain it. The paper discusses the increasing
penetration of mobile phones and the key considerations of use of mobile
banking. The paper proposes an Interactive Voice Response (IVR) based mobile
banking model in the cloud suitable for a developing country like India. The
World Development Indicators show increasing penetration of mobile phones in
both the developed and the developing world. This model can perform the basic
formal banking operations with less dependence on external agents or business
correspondents. The model assumes the availability of Internet facility in the
mobile phones. IVR based models in the cloud are very rare. Most of the
existing models use mobile Short Messaging Service (SMS).

Academic conference organizers encourage tweeting during presentations to
promote access and engagement. In this paper, I provide a methodological
framework for analyzing Twitter conversations during academic conferences. An
analysis of tweets archived during the 2014 Conference on College Composition
and Communication is included as an example. Tweets using the #4C14 hashtag
(N=12,522) were analyzed to determine 1) when people tweet during conferences,
2) what sessions they tweet about most, 3) how often participants tweet during
sessions, and 4) what people tweet about at conferences during times of high
Twitter activity. Results suggest conference attendees tweet most frequently
during the middle of each day during the conference, presentations related to
technology yield high Twitter activity, and retweeting particular sessions
extended presentations far beyond the designated time blocks of each conference
panel. These results provide valuable information for conference organizers and
experience architects interested in promoting participatory digital spaces
during academic conferences.

Identifying how U.S. nonprofit organizations operate within the Information
Process Maturity Model

In this paper, the researcher investigates grant writers' perspectives on
knowledge management practices within nonprofit organizations. The researcher
uses survey data (n = 448) to assess where organizations fall within JoAnn
Hackos's Information Process Maturity Model (IPMM) [1]. The paper asks, how do
proposal writers perceive current documentation efforts within their
organizations? Is there a relationship between an organization's annual
operating budget and employees' satisfaction with documentation efforts?
Results indicate that most nonprofit organizations fall within the Ad hoc or
Rudimentary stage of the IPMM. However, this classification may be due to grant
writers' preferences to create individual rather than organizational
documentation systems. Organizational documentation practices have both short-
and long-term economic implications for the nonprofit industry, particularly
fundraising, where employee turnover is a problem.

End-user authored tutorials found on the Web are increasingly becoming the
norm for assisting users with learning software applications, but little is
known about the quality of these tutorials. Using quality metrics derived from
previous work, we perform a usability expert review on a sample of Photoshop
tutorials, a popular image-manipulation program with one of the largest
showings of web-based tutorials. We also explore how the characteristics of
these tutorials differ across four tutorial sources, representing those that
are, i) written by a close-knit online community; ii) written by expert users;
iii) most likely to be found; and iv) representative of the general population
of tutorials. Our analysis reveals that expert users generally write higher
quality tutorials, and that many of the tutorials in our sample suffer from
some important limitations, such as lacking attempts to help users avoid common
errors. We also find that a single five-star rating system did not sufficiently
distinguish quality between the tutorials. Building on this later finding, we
propose and evaluate a rating approach based on multiple criteria, finding
strong initial support for such an approach.

All of the Things: Engaging Complex Assemblages in Communication Design

In this paper, we compare sociocultural theories of communication and user
experience design to scholarship from associative and new materialist
approaches. We argue for a more expansive and symmetrical perspective on
communication design -- one that broadens the scope of potential actors that
affect user experiences, and that more strongly considers their effects on
communicative activities. We posit three ways in which this perspective may be
operationalized: (a) accounting for the missing masses, (b) designing for flat
ontologies and radical symmetry, and (c) designing for interagentivity.
Finally, we offer an initial heuristic for deploying such approaches and
discuss scenarios in which they may prove fruitful.

Social Justice in Technologies of Prenatal Care: Toward a User Centered
Approach to Technical Communication in Home Pregnancy Testing

This article explores two questions increasingly posed by technical
communications scholars: "What implicit moral or ethical assumptions exist in
the contexts of health and medical communication? If we are aware of these
assumptions, what practices can technical communicators engage in to promote
social justice in these contexts?". In the specific instance of home pregnancy
test packaging and instructions, the lack of attention to social justice
concerns is evidenced when comparing this system-centered technical
communication to user-centered online health forums wherein users discuss their
lived experiences with the tests, expressing frustration to outright fear.
Here, a case study of three brands of home pregnancy tests' packaging offers
findings that the technical communication of home pregnancy tests violates an
ethic of care to the user. This article proposes that the health and medical
communication be brought into alignment with the user-centered, participatory
models of online health forums in order to promote social justice in the
context of the home pregnancy test.

Women, Religion, and Professional Communication: Communication Design for
the Female Relief Society, 1842-1920

My archival research internship experience with a women's discourses project
suggests that professional documentation is a vital part of building and
maintaining organizations. The historical sources I examined from a religious
institution's women's organization displayed a variety of professional
communication genres, all of them working to make the larger organization
successful and functional. Organizational communication worked to
simultaneously promote women's industrial independence while tying women to the
larger organization by promoting identities for participating women. These
forms of communication ultimately united and disciplined the women of the
organization, allowing them to share religious best practices, domestic
techniques, and community values with one another. There is much work to be
done on the history of professional communication in archives, including how it
has been used to design religious organizations.

Genre Cycling: The Infrastructural Function of an Operational Assessment
Review and Reporting Process at a Federal Scientific Supercomputing User
Facility

This paper reports on the first phase of a study of technical documentation
and reporting at a scientific supercomputing user facility. This paper proposes
a new conceptualization of how multiple genres interrelate to coordinate and
mediate the functioning of an organization. Based on the case of the
operational assessment review and reporting process, this paper strives to
differentiate the function of organizational genres to maintain the
infrastructural operations of an organization from the function of genres to
mediate the production of an organization's mission-based output. The
theory-informed analytical tool proposed by this case study, the genre cycle,
proposes parameters for further inquiry into the generalizability of the
concept.

Experience Reports

Translating Art Installation into ICT: Lessons Learned from an Experience at
Workspace

Interactive digital art can create innovative ways to stimulate and engage
audience, what could benefit the space where the installation is done. Aiming
at promoting the adoption of non-used places through pleasant experiences, we
considered an art project that promotes people engagement to make them become
the community's wishes expression. We focus on understanding the process to
translate the essence of an artistic expression using Information and
Communications Technology (ICT). We translated this artistic expression into
digital art installation within a socially 'abandoned' space at a workplace.
The biggest challenge is to understand how people interact with the dynamic
art-system, that, potentially, it leads audience to experience a highly
intimate relationship with the installation and the space. Preliminary results
reveal a similar behavior in the audience at both installations, which
highlights the potential of ICT to translate the essence of an artistic
expression and promote the adoption of a space.

Brokering ISUComm Sites: Toward the Creation of a Large Scale ePortfolio
Platform for Multimodal Composition

This report outlines the authors' experiences developing and piloting
ISUComm Sites, an electronic portfolio platform currently in development for
ISUComm foundation courses at Iowa State University. Since 2007, ISUComm has
sought to better teach students the electronic mode of communication through
such a platform, but for some time the project had stalled. This changed in the
spring of 2014, when the authors of this article negotiated the resources
necessary to build a WordPress installation created both for and by teachers of
ISUComm courses. This platform affords students the capability to build online
portfolios that showcase their developing identities as scholars and
professionals. But to be successful, our project needed "boundary brokers," or
graduate students who use their experience as system developers and teachers to
negotiate between stakeholders and users at all levels of implementation and
development.

Unifying the Shift and Narrow Strategies in Focus+Context Exploratory Search

In this paper we discuss two existing exploration strategies -- Shift and
Narrow -- employed by Focus+Context techniques, and how they are supported in
the user interface of Saffron, a web-based system enabling exploration of
academic topics, authors, and publications. The Shift strategy enables the user
to shift focus between different resources while the Narrow strategy enables
the user to narrow the focus. Current systems typically support only one of
these approaches or include them as separate interaction modes. Saffron
supports both strategies in a unified user interface. An initial user study
indicates that participants use and appreciate both strategies being supported
simultaneously.

An Exploratory Look at Online Instruction Delivery Across Electronic Devices

We present the results from a usability pilot study to determine if students
will perform better accessing and synthesizing course materials between laptops
and mobile devices, and also to determine whether or not the students'
satisfaction will be higher on mobile devices than laptops. From the results of
the study, we highlight some potential gaps in online instruction delivery
across devices.

Posters

Stories from the Workplace: Using Mini-Modules Online to Increase Student
Motivation and Learning

In this article, we describe the incorporation of video modules into three
professional communication classrooms. These modules were designed to give both
teachers and students access to professional practitioners and their views
about the changing role of communication in the 21st century workplace. We
incorporated these modules into professional communication courses
(junior/senior level technical communication course) and courses in the
disciplines (freshman and senior engineering design courses). The article
discusses how content designed to simulate the language conventions of friendly
conversation can impact student motivation and foster greater participation in
the professional communication classroom.

Rhetorical Functions of Hashtag Forms Across Social Media Applications

This study analyzes the complex rhetorical practice of hashtag use across
social media platforms and emphasizes the implications for UX designers and
technical communicators working with social media. Specifically, we document
and analyze the ways that users extend the function of hashtagging beyond
findability toward meta-communication, effectively co-designing the hashtagging
feature and helping social media designers develop new possibilities for
hashtags as communicative tools. Qualitatively-collected data from five popular
social media applications (Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, and Pinterest)
are used to investigate how users implement hashtags in different contexts in
order to achieve particular rhetorical purposes. Using a grounded approach, we
identify 5 primary categories of "metacommunicative" hashtags and suggest how
experience architects might incorporate them into future social media designs.

In this interactive poster, I describe methods for introducing professionals
from any background to key UX knowledge-making practices (ways); deliverables
and concepts that professionals new to UX should be able to create (things);
and means of sustaining this work within organizations (impact). This workflow
has been developed through my own work teaching classes in UX within higher
education, and through collaboration with UX training programs in industry.

Evidence of Things Not Seen: Mapping Sentiment in Unstructured Texts about
the Herbicide 'Agent Orange'

Sentiment analysis is a new, relatively unexplored, but potentially helpful
method technical communicators can measure shifts in feeling, values, attitudes
and beliefs, which drive behavior. Sentiment analysis is a relatively new
method so there is little research in technical communications that address
best practices. This poster demonstrates the process by which I mined sentiment
from a corpus of unstructured text using a dictionary, categorization model and
co-location algorithms. Preliminary results are consistent with empirical and
historical observations, showing an uptick in negative emotion during moments
of greatest political and scientific controversy. The implications of this
research suggest new programs and greater access to digitized texts offer the
practitioner and scholar new sites and tools with which to conduct research
wider in scale and scope, but that the disambiguation of texts continues to
prevent total automation of such processes.

User Experience is a quickly evolving, interdisciplinary field that combines
psychology, communication, social science, design, technology, and other
specialized knowledge areas in an attempt to better understand how users
interact with information products and how practitioners can better design such
products. However, User Experience/Information Architect jobs commonly ask for
applicants whose degrees are in technical disciplines, such as computer
science, rather than technical communication. Industry isn't always aware of
the unique qualifications that non-computer science majors can bring to these
often technology-intensive jobs. This poster will present the results of an
investigation of over 1000 "user experience" job ads, collected in the fall of
2013, to identify the job titles, educational and experience requirements,
technological competencies, and soft qualifications sought by user
experience/information architect jobs. The data can help us better understand
the anatomy of this emerging field and, in turn, articulate the value -- added
of graduates from technical communication and related programs.

This interactive poster serves to showcase the evolving roles Institutional
Review Boards (IRB) have in research on texts, both physical and digital. Over
time, the awareness of and adherence to IRB has grown in technical and
professional communication research and scholarship. Part of this growth can be
attributed to need (research is more and more being conducted in places such as
hospitals, where privacy is vital). However, recent cases, such as the PANS
article regarding Facebook and emotion manipulation, indicate that the user
experience (UX) of certain products call traditional IRB policies in to
question. In particular, questions about text production, dissemination, and
subsequent research on texts indicate that IRB policies have not evolved to
meet the demands of present research culture. This poster suggests that the
narratives and extensions of IRBs preclude and exclude serious consideration of
texts by their very design and representation to researchers. This poster
examines how IRBs communicate policies to technical and professional
communication researchers, and, in light of new research methodologies,
researchers can develop extensions to IRB protocol internal to the field. In
doing so, this poster aims to ensure ethical treatment of human subjects both
as participants, and as authors of texts, in research.

Capturing the Ephemeral: Using Digital Tools to Record Sites of
Participatory Memory

Throughout the world, every day people are participating in sanctioned and
unsanctioned memory making activities in public spaces. Due to their
ever-changing status, sites of public memory are difficult to capture and
archive. This poster brief focuses on determining methods for successfully
recording the changes in these spaces using various digital platforms. By
exploring and testing these platforms, we hope to discover which space offers
the best way to discuss and record a site. The findings of this research will
offer insight on how best to capture and discuss spaces that undergo frequent
change.

This poster brief describes ongoing research on user taxonomies in free
internet pornography, examining tagging and filtering systems in two digital
porn bulletin boards on the social network Reddit. These two communities --
r/PornVids, a board for mainstream porn, and r/ChickFlixxx, a board for
woman-friendly or feminist porn -- offer unique insight into not only porn
consumption patterns, but also ways of sorting pornography according to
distinctly gendered preferences. The researcher concludes by describing future
directions for empirical inquiry into internet pornography, making a case for
the importance of affective considerations in user research and interface
design.

In this poster presentation, the author presents results of a study about
student journalist perceptions of the wearable technology Google Glass (Glass).
This poster presents the first set of results of an ongoing research project
designed to determine what factors play the largest roles in student decision
making processes about whether or not to use a new technology. Survey results
of students in a semester-long capstone journalism course are presented.
Results indicate that students' perceptions of social norms related to the new
technology shaped early use of the wearable device. After becoming more
familiar with Glass and using the device in training sessions, student social
norm apprehensions did not decrease. This printed poster will include video
footage related to the project through augmented reality technology accessible
via smartphones.

This interactive poster explores the application of the 12 cognitive
dimensions of API usability to API documentation planning by using the
dimensions to identify and characterize the factors that influence the
documentation that the users of an API require. Many factors can complicate
estimating and planning the documentation an API requires. Even when an API's
documentation requirements can be estimated, it can be difficult to present to
stakeholders an objective basis for the estimate. The cognitive dimensions of
API usability have characterized APIs and their users successfully and they
have been used to communicate these characterizations to stakeholders. It
follows that the same dimensions could also help identify the documentation
that an API requires to provide a satisfactory and successful experience for
the software developers who use the API.